1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a marine fender mounted to a berthing wall such as quay wall or the like for mitigating a berthing shock of a vessel.
2. Related Art Statement
It is well-known that marine fenders having various forms such as cylindrical form, hollow frustoconical form, hollow frustopyramidal form and the like are made from an elastomeric material such as rubber, rubbery resin or the like and are used by mounting to the berthing wall. In general, a shock receiving plate made of steel is attached to the top of the marine fender for making a force per unit area acting to the outside plate of the vessel small and uniform.
However, when adopting the shock receiving steel plate, it is required to hang such a shock receiving plate having a large weight through chains or the like attached at one end to the quay wall. Further, the marine fender can not follow the change in the form of the vessel body because of the large rigidity of the shock receiving plate.
For the most part of marine fenders provided with the shock receiving plate, the deformation amount with respect to initial loading is small, so that the oscillation of the mooring vessel becomes unfavorably large. In order to solve this problem, a round flexible marine fender may further be disposed to the front surface of the shock receiving plate, which results in the increase of installation cost for marine fender.